the
kingdom of Granada, and his descendants intermarried with some of the
noblest families of the Peninsula and numbered among them soldiers,
magistrates, and Church dignitaries, including at least two
cardinal-archbishops.

Of the line that settled in Andalusia, Deigo de Cervantes, Commander of
the Order of Santiago, married Juana Avellaneda, daughter of Juan Arias
de Saavedra, and had several sons, of whom one was Gonzalo Gomez,
Corregidor of Jerez and ancestor of the Mexican and Columbian branches of
the family; and another, Juan, whose son Rodrigo married Dona Leonor de
Cortinas, and by her had four children, Rodrigo, Andrea, Luisa, and
Miguel, our author.

The pedigree of Cervantes is not without its bearing on "Don Quixote." A
man who could look back upon an ancestry of genuine knights-errant
extending from well-nigh the time of Pelayo to the siege of Granada was
likely to have a strong feeling on the subject of the sham chivalry of
the romances. It gives a point, too, to what he says in more than one
place about families that have once been great and have tapered away
until they have come to nothing, like a pyramid. It was the case of his
own.

He was born at Alcala de Henares and baptised in the church of Santa
Maria Mayor on the 9th of October, 1547. Of his boyhood and youth we know
nothing, unless it be from the glimpse he gives us in the preface to his
"Comedies" of himself as a boy looking on with delight while Lope de
Rueda and his company set up their rude plank stage in the plaza and
acted the rustic farces which he himself afterwards took as the model of
his interludes. This first glimpse, however, is a significant one, for it
shows the early development of that love of the drama which exercised
such an influence on his life and seems to have grown stronger as he grew
older, and of which this very preface, written only a few months before
his death, is such a striking proof. He gives us to understand, too, that
he was a great reader in his youth; but of this no assurance was needed,
for the First Part of "Don Quixote" alone proves a vast amount of
miscellaneous reading, romances of chivalry, ballads, popular poetry,
chronicles, for which he had no time or opportunity except in the first
twenty years of his life; and his misquotations and mistakes in matters
of detail are always, it may be noticed, those of a man recalling the
reading of his boyhood.

Other things besides the drama were in their infa